UKAN: Uncommitted KAOS Accessible Nodes

KAOS (Compilers, Hardware Architectures, and Operating Systems)
is a systems research group at the University of Kentucky,
externally known as Aggregate.Org. We operate multiple cluster
supercomputers and are happy to freely share our
computing resources with worthy users.

I Need Compute Cycles... Can I Use Your Machines?

If you just want to do production runs of a program written by
somebody else, for which you have no involvement with the source
code, the answer is almost certainly no.
The answer is probably yes if:

You have been or will be directly involved in creating
or improving the source code of the application you
wish to run.

There is a compelling reason why University of Kentucky
resources, and the volunteered efforts of members of our
research group, should be used to support your project.
Valid reasons are:

You are a current or potential research
collaborator. Such collaborators need not be faculty;
they can be students at any level or even for-profit companies
under the right conditions (e.g., writing joint proposals to
fund collaborative research). We have had many successful
research collaborations with application developers before,
often involving us helping to make the application more
efficient or have new capabilities.

You are working on a project that is of general benefit
to the community, both potentially useful to many and
with significant benefits intended to be granted free of charge.

Although we can treat resources as a sharable pool of nodes,
we prefer to allocate an entire cluster to a single parallel
program at a time.

If our facilities are not sufficient, but easily can be
upgraded, we may be willing to do so if you provide the parts.
For example, we have little disk space, but adding disks costs
only about $125 per 2TB drive. Covering costs associated with
replacing failed parts, etc., also can make more nodes available
for your work.

Given that volunteers maintain our equipment and we have little
to no maintenance budget, we cannot make any promises about QoS
(quality of service). In fact, we reserve the right to kick
stuff off any machine at any time without prior notice. If you
cannot live with this "best effort" level of service, UKAN is
not for you.

What Do You Have And How Do I Use It?

Although the group has many clusters, not all are available to UKAN users at
any given point in time either due to maintenance/configuration issues or
because some machines are busy with our group's research. A reasonably up to
date list of equipment immediately available to UKAN users is kept here.

Just to put this in perspective, as of December 9, 2012, UK deployed a $2.6M cluster supercomputer with a theoretical peak of
around 140 TFLOPS using "nearly 5,000 central processing units and 48
high-performance graphics processing units." In contrast, the cluster
supercomputers and other systems within our KAOS group at that time total a
theoretical peak around 25 TFLOPS using about 400 conventional processor cores
and 80 GPUs (and a cluster of FPGAs that don't contribute to the FLOPS count).

We have created a reference card (PDF)
overviewing our equipment, using OpenCL with KOAP, and using
MPI.

How Do I Apply?

Send your application as an email to UKAN at the
University of Kentucky's engineering school,
engr.uky.edu. Your email should include:

Your name and organization.

Physical mailing address.

A brief, informal, description/proposal of what you want to be
doing, including any relevant constraints. For example, all our
machines run Linux (primarily CentOS and the usual free software environment, so you
would need to have a plan for how to provide us with any
non-free libraries or utilities your code needs. Also mention
why you feel it is appropriate for us to provide you with
cycles.

Timeframe for use. It is particularly useful to know if there
are deadlines involved.

Which cluster you would prefer to run on. This is especially important for
longer jobs.

Any information submitted will be used only within our research
group for purposes directly related to the UKAN facilities.

This Is Cool. Can I Help?

Of course! If you are a student at the University of Kentucky,
you can particupate in any cluster "build parties," or perhaps
get more involved by attending our group meetings and joining
the KAOS list serve.

"Give me your tired, your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore." For us, that's about computer equipment. We are
experts at making good use of old equpiment that was about to be
trashed.

We also have a long history of getting new machines donated to
us by manufacturers just before or shortly after public release.
Of course, we love that too, and are very happy to serve as
"alpha testers" and even to help create and refine the system
hardware/software.